After Jack McGlynn’s star turn with the U.S. national team, where does he fit with the Union?

At this point in Jack McGlynn’s career, anyone who has watched him knows the talent in his outstanding left foot.

But it remains the case that only so many people have watched the 21-year-old midfielder, because he hasn’t made the jump from MLS to Europe yet.

Union fans have seen McGlynn a lot, of course, and anyone who watched the Olympics saw him play for the U.S. under-23 men’s team. Over the last few days, senior U.S. men’s team manager Mauricio Pochettino has seen him up close at the annual January training camp for domestic prospects.

That led to McGlynn getting his second national team cap in Saturday’s 3-1 friendly win over Venezuela. He played the whole game, and played very well: 104 touches, 86-of-89 passing, three scoring chances created, three shots, three duels won of five contested, one tackle, one block, and six defensive recoveries.

Oh, and he launched a 30-yard rocket to open the scoring with his first senior national team goal. We probably shouldn’t forget that part.

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The goal naturally grabbed headlines. McGlynn has scored a few like that for the Union, but doing so with the national team is a different story.

It’s also natural that some people would just look at the goal and not the rest of his game. Pochettino knew better, and so did the media who asked him about it. They knew it had to raise the biggest question about McGlynn’s potential.

As great as McGlynn’s attacking talents are, can they do enough to make up for his defensive deficiencies?

Pochettino put McGlynn in a structure where the weaknesses could be masked somewhat: the midfield base of a 4-2-3-1. Inter Miami’s Benjamin Cremaschi was the other half of the duo for the first 65 minutes, then Real Salt Lake’s Emeka Eneli subbed in.

“I think he had a good balance between his capacity to play and his capacity to recover the ball when the team doesn’t have it,” Pochettino said postgame, using the word equilibrio in his native Spanish. “With his quality, he will eventually have that growth. … We need to help him and see where he can evolve and make him the best player he can be. Technically, he’s special, with his shooting, vision — he interprets the game quite well.”

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The manager said he is “not worried” about what McGlynn lacks defensively, at least for now.

“He’s very open to evolve, and his potential is very high,” Pochettino said.

All of this was nice to hear. But the word that mattered most wasn’t evolve, potential, quality, or eventually. It was balance.

McGlynn does not get to have balance with the Union. His job requires a lot more defense than offense, and he knows it better than anyone.

His club role also requires being alone in his part of the field for significant stretches. That likely won’t change under new manager Bradley Carnell — certainly not if the Union stick to their traditional diamond-shaped 4-4-2 formation. All four midfield spots have their own patches of turf, including the left-central spot where McGlynn usually has played.

The Union have been playing this way for long enough now that it influences how they recruit potential academy prospects. When former academy director Tommy Wilson scouted a teenage McGlynn in his native Queens, N.Y., Wilson knew McGlynn wouldn’t quite fit the desired mold.

“Jack McGlynn has attributes that do not necessarily align with the Philadelphia Union’s style of play,” Wilson (who’s now Charlotte FC’s technical director) said in a speech at the United Soccer Coaches Convention earlier this month. “But he was such a talent that we couldn’t do anything other than recruit him.”

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If the Union had to do it over again, would they? Put this way: any team probably would, especially when McGlynn’s family really wanted him to get into the Union academy’s residency setup. They preferred it over long daily commutes to the New York Red Bulls and New York City FC academies — so much so that in 2023, sources told The Inquirer that he would have gone to Europe had he been unable to join the Union.

Now back to the present. With Leon Flach gone, no new central midfield signings yet, and Alejandro Bedoya another year older, the Union need some defensive heft to run with Quinn Sullivan and Dániel Gazdag. So is there room for McGlynn?

Maybe there is if Carnell tweaks the tactics a little bit this year and shifts that diamond to a box: two attacking midfielders in front of two defensive ones. But he almost certainly won’t shift to a 4-2-3-1 or anything similar that would give McGlynn the kind of cover Pochettino offered.

The answer won’t really come until McGlynn arrives at the Union’s preseason. He was expected to play again for the U.S. in Wednesday’s friendly against Costa Rica in Orlando to wrap January camp, then prepare to join the Union in Spain. Carnell said he expects McGlynn to arrive on Friday, which isn’t much time before the club returns to Philadelphia on Monday.

They’ll get a few days off after that, then train briefly in Chester (if the weather allows) before heading to Clearwater, Fla., on Feb. 2. That will give Carnell his first in-person chance to fit McGlynn into his playbook.

“On the outside, evaluating a roster is different to being within the four walls and seeing the guys in their daily activities, reading the psyche and the mentality of the player, seeing the intrinsic drive of each individual,” Carnell said. “He has many qualities, and there’s been, with my staff and myself, some different discussions [about] how we can best utilize that. And to find that balance that ‘Poch’ is talking about.”

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As predicted here when the initial news broke, the Union came off FIFA’s registration ban list earlier this week.

FIFA didn’t announce exactly when it happened, but the Union remained on the public list as Sunday and were off it by Tuesday night. They had gone on the list on Dec. 4 because of the late processing of a solidarity payment to the youth club of reserve team forward José Riasco a while back.

A source with knowledge of the matter told The Inquirer that FIFA had the Union’s paperwork before the ban started, but the Union had to wait for world soccer’s governing body to process everything. That’s done, so any players the club acquires before the season starts are clear to play in official games.

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